Search results for ""author corinne saunders""

The themes of magic and the supernatural in medieval romance are here fully explored and put into the context of thinking at the time in this first full study of the subject. The world of medieval romance is one in which magic and the supernatural are constantly present: in otherwordly encounters, in the strange adventures experienced by questing knights, in the experience of the uncanny, and in marvellous objects - rings, potions, amulets, and the celebrated green girdle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This study looks at a wide range of medieval English romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas. The bookopens with a survey of classical and biblical precedents, and of medieval attitudes to magic; subsequent chapters explore the ways that romances both reflect contemporary attitudes and ideas, and imaginatively transform them. Inparticular, the author explores the distinction between the `white magic' of healing and protection, and the more dangerous arts of `nigromancy', black magic. Also addressed is the wider supernatural, including the ways that ideasassociated with human magic can be intensified and developed in depictions of otherworldly practitioners of magic. The ambiguous figures of the enchantress and the shapeshifter are a special focus, and the faery is contrasted with the Christian supernatural - miracles, ghosts, spirits, demons and incubi. Professor CORINNE SAUNDERS Saunders teaches in the Department of English, University of Durham.

Read more less

Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define. This groundbreaking Companion surveys the many permutations of romance throughout the ages. Considers the literary and historical development of the romance genre from its classical origins to the present day Incorporates discussion of the changing readership of romance and of romance’s special relation to women readers Comprises 30 essays written by leading authorities on different periods and sub-genres Challenges the idea that the appeal of romance is exclusively escapist Draws on a wide range of specific and influential literary examples

Read more less

This comprehensive collection of the major critical views of Chaucer's works over time engages students with the entire critical history. Introduces students to the critical discourse on Chaucer's works from a historical perspective. Encourages students to make links between past and present criticism. Foregrounds those modern approaches that are genuinely productive. Avoids a formulaic approach through lively editorial commentary and judicious selection of texts.

Read more less

MEDIEVAL POETRY In a series of original essays from leading literary scholars, this Companion offers a chronological sweep of medieval poetry from Old English to the great genres of romance, narrative, and alliterative poetry of the 15th century. Beginning in the Anglo-Saxon period, the volume explores the Old English language and its alliterative tradition, before moving on to examine the genres of heroic, devotional, wisdom and epic poetry, culminating in a discussion of arguably the founding text of the English literary canon, the great epic Beowulf. In part two, the Companion moves on to discuss the linguistic and social changes brought about as a result of the Norman Conquest, exploring how this influenced the development of literary genres. Essays probe the shifts and continuities in genres such as lyric, chronicle and dream vision, and the emergence of new genres such as popular and courtly romance, and drama. A particular focus is the continuation of the alliterative tradition from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fifteenth century. A series of chapters on major authors, including Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, provide fresh approaches to reading and studying key texts, such as The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Finally, the collection examines cultural change at the close of the medieval period and the variety of literature produced in the ‘long fifteenth century’, including writing by and for women, Scots poetry, clerical and courtly works, and secular and sacred drama.

Read more less

An exploration of the development of Middle English portrayals of rape and ravishment in the context of shifting legal, theological and medical attitudes. This work explores and untangles the theme of rape, and its counterpart ravishment, in Anglo-French cultural tradition between the disintegration of the classical world and the Renaissance. Tracing debate and dialogue across intellectual and literary discourses, Corinne Saunders places Middle English literary portrayals of rape and ravishment in the context of shifting legal, theological and medical attitudes. The treatment of rape and ravishment is considered across a wide range of literary genres: hagiography, where female saints are repeatedly threatened with rape; legendary history, as in the stories of Lucretia and Helen; and romance, where acts of rape and ravishment challenge and shape chivalric order, and romance heroes are conceived through rape. Finally, the ways in which Malory and Chaucer write and rewrite rape and ravishment are examined.Dr CORINNE SAUNDERS is Lecturer in Medieval Studies, Department of English, University of Durham.

Read more less

This concise companion provides a succinct introduction to Chaucer's major works, the contexts in which he wrote, and to medieval thought more generally. Opens with a general introductory section discussing London life and politics, books and authority, manuscripts and readers. Subsequent sections focus on Chaucer’s major works – the dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. Essays highlight the key religious, political and intellectual contexts for each major work. Also covers important general topics, including: medieval literary genres; dream theory; the Church; gender and sexuality; and reading Chaucer aloud. Designed so that each contextual essay can be read alongside one of Chaucer’s major works.

Read more less

Traces the development of the forest as a central literary motif in medieval romance. Corinne J. Saunders's exploration of the topos of the forest, a familiar and ubiquitous motif in the literature of the middle ages, is a broad study embracing a range of medieval and Elizabethan exts from the twelft to the sixteenth centuries: the roman d'antiquite, Breton lay and courtly romance, the hagiographical tradition of the Vita Merlini and the Queste del Saint Graal, Spenser and Shakespeare. Saunders identifies the forest as a primary romance landscape, as a place of adventure, love, and spiritual vision... offers a pleasurable overview of the narrative function of the forest as a literary landscape. Based on a close comparative [and theoretically non-partisan] reading ofa broad range of literary texts drawn from the Europeqan canon, Saunders's study explores the continuity and transformation of an important motif in the corpus of medieval literature. MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEWDr CORINNE SAUNDERSteaches in the Department of English at the University of Durham. [BLURBEXTRACTED FROM TLS REVIEW] ...An immense tract, not only of medieval literature but of human experience [is] engagingly introduced and presented here...Corinne Saunders considers first forests in reality (a reality which keeps breaking through in romance...). She looks also at the classical and biblical models including Virgil, Statius and Nebuchadnezzar...only then does she turn tothe non-real and non-Classical, i.e. the medieval and romantic. Here she follows a clear chronological plan from twelfth to fifteenth centuries [also covering] the allegorized landscape of Spenser and the lovers' woods of Arden or Athens in Shakespeare. Her text-by-text layout does justice to the variety of possibilities taken up by different authors; the forest as a place where men run mad and turn into animals, a place of voluntary suffering, a focus ofsignificance in the Grail-quests, a lovers' bower; above all and centrally, the place where the knight is tested and defined, even (as with Perceval) created.

Read more less

This comprehensive collection of the major critical views of Chaucer's works over time engages students with the entire critical history. Introduces students to the critical discourse on Chaucer's works from a historical perspective. Encourages students to make links between past and present criticism. Foregrounds those modern approaches that are genuinely productive. Avoids a formulaic approach through lively editorial commentary and judicious selection of texts.

Read more less

Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define. This groundbreaking Companion surveys the many permutations of romance throughout the ages. Considers the literary and historical development of the romance genre from its classical origins to the present day Incorporates discussion of the changing readership of romance and of romance’s special relation to women readers Comprises 30 essays written by leading authorities on different periods and sub-genres Challenges the idea that the appeal of romance is exclusively escapist Draws on a wide range of specific and influential literary examples

Read more less

Focusing on England but covering a wide range of European and global traditions and influences, this authoritative volume examines the central role of medieval women in the production and circulation of books and considers their representation in medieval literary texts, as authors, readers and subjects, assessing how these change over time. Engaging with Latin, French, German, Welsh and Gaelic literary culture, it places British writing in wider European contexts while also considering more distant influences such as Arabic. Essays span topics including book production and authorship; reception; linguistic, literary, and cultural contexts and influences; women's education and spheres of knowledge; women as writers, scribes and translators; women as patrons, readers and book owners; and women as subjects. Reflecting recent trends in scholarship, the volume spans the early Middle Ages through to the eve of the Reformation and emphasises the multilingual, multicultural and international contexts of women's literary culture.

Read more less

New approaches to the everlasting malleability and transformation of medieval romance. The essays here reconsider the protean nature of Middle English romance. The contributors examine both the cultural unity of romance and its many variations, reiterations and reimaginings, including its contexts and engagements with other discourses and forms, as they were "rewritten" during the Middle Ages and beyond. Ranging across popular, anonymous English and courtly romances, and taking in the works of Chaucer and Arthurian romance (rarely treated together), in connection with continental sources and analogues, the chapters probe this fluid and creative genre to ask just how comfortable, and how flexible, are its nature and aims? How were Middle English romances rewritten toaccommodate contemporary concerns and generic expectations? What can attention to narrative techniques and conventional gestures reveal about the reassurances romances offer, or the questions they ask? How do romances' central concerns with secular ideals and conduct intersect with spiritual priorities? And how are romances transformed or received in later periods? The volume is also a tribute to the significance and influence of the work of Professor Helen Cooper on romance. Elizabeth Archibald is Professor of English Studies at Durham University; Megan G. Leitch is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University; Corinne Saunders is Professor of English andCo-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Contributors: Elizabeth Archibald, Julia Boffey, Christopher Cannon, Neil Cartlidge, Miriam Edlich-Muth, A.S.G. Edwards, Marcel Elias, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Jill Mann, Marco Nievergelt, Ad Putter, Corinne Saunders, Barry Windeatt, R.F. Yeager

Read more less

Analysis of how emotion is pictured in Arthurian legend. Literary texts complicate our understanding of medieval emotions; they not only represent characters experiencing emotion and reaction emotionally to the behaviour of others within the text, but also evoke and play upon emotion inthe audiences which heard these texts performed or read. The presentation and depiction of emotion in the single most prominent and influential story matter of the Middle Ages, the Arthurian legend, is the subject of this volume.Covering texts written in English, French, Dutch, German, Latin and Norwegian, the essays presented here explore notions of embodiment, the affective quality of the construction of mind, and the intermediary role of the voice asboth an embodied and consciously articulating emotion. Frank Brandsma teaches Comparative Literature (Middle Ages) at Utrecht University; Carolyne Larrington is a Fellow in medieval English at St John's College, Oxford;Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Durham. Contributors: Anne Baden-Daintree, Frank Brandsma, Helen Cooper, Anatole Pierre Fuksas, Jane Gilbert, Carolyne Larrington, Andrew Lynch, Raluca Radulescu, Sif Rikhardsdottir, Corinne Saunders,

Read more less

"Pearl" is one of the greatest English Medieval poems, a dream vision that is both a profoundly personal elegy for the dreamer's lost daughter and a subtle theological debate about the most difficult existential questions. In this parallel text edition the original poem is printed opposite a modernised version which retains all the formal features of the original - its elaborate musical schemes of alliteration and rhyme, and its rich vocabulary. Words unfamiliar to the contemporary reader are glossed alongside the modernisation so that the poem can easily be read by anybody not familiar with its idiom. In her introduction (almost the last piece of writing completed before her death) Kathleen Raine discusses the poem's celebration 'of all that the anima means and has meant throughout human history and as the inspiration of so much of the greatest poetry'.

Read more less

Analysis of how emotion is pictured in Arthurian legend. Literary texts complicate our understanding of medieval emotions; they not only represent characters experiencing emotion and reaction emotionally to the behaviour of others within the text, but also evoke and play upon emotion inthe audiences which heard these texts performed or read. The presentation and depiction of emotion in the single most prominent and influential story matter of the Middle Ages, the Arthurian legend, is the subject of this volume.Covering texts written in English, French, Dutch, German, Latin and Norwegian, the essays presented here explore notions of embodiment, the affective quality of the construction of mind, and the intermediary role of the voice asboth an embodied and consciously articulating emotion. FRANK BRANDSMA teaches Comparative Literature (Middle Ages) at Utrecht University; CAROLYNE LARRINGTON is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow in Medieval English Literature at St John's College, Oxford; CORINNE SAUNDERS is Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Durham. Contributors: Anne Baden-Daintree, Frank Brandsma, Helen Cooper, Anatole Pierre Fuksas, Jane Gilbert, Carolyne Larrington, Andrew Lynch, Raluca Radulescu, Sif Rikhardsdottir, Corinne Saunders.

Read more less

Legal records illuminate womens' use of legal processes, with regard to the making of wills, the age of consent, rights concerning marriage and children, women as traders, etc. Determined and largely successful effort to read behind and alongside legal discourses to discover women's voices and women's feelings. It adds usefully to the wider debate on women's role in medieval society. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW What is really new here is the ways in which the authors approach the history of the law: they use some decidedly non-legal texts to examine legal history; they bring together historical and literary sources; and they debunk the view that medieval laws had little to say about women or that medieval women had little legal agency. ALBION The legal position of the late medieval woman has been much neglected, and it is this gap which the essays collected here seek to fill. They explore the ways in which women of all ages and stations during the late middle ages (c.1300-c.1500) could legally shift for themselves, and how and where they did so. Particular topics discussed include the making of wills, the age of consent, rights concerning marriage, care, custody and guardianship (with particular emphasis on the rights of a mother attempting to gain custody of her own children within the court system), women as traders, women as criminals, prostitution, the rights of battered women within the courts, the procedures women had to go through to gain legal redress and access, rape, and women within guilds. NOELJAMES MENUGE gained her Ph.D. from the Centre of Medieval Studies at the University of York. Contributors: P.J.P. GOLDBERG, VICTORIA THOMPSON, JENNIFER SMITH, CORDELIA BEATTIE, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, NOEL JAMES MENUGE, CORINNE SAUNDERS, KIM M. PHILLIPS, EMMA HAWKES

Read more less

A wide-ranging collection on one of the most interesting features of medieval romance. Medieval romance frequently, and perhaps characteristically, capitalises on the dramatic and suggestive possibilities implicit in boundaries - not only the geographical, political and cultural frontiers that medieval romances imagine and imply, but also more metaphorical demarcations. It is these boundaries, as they appear in insular romances circulating in English and French, which the essays in this volume address. They include the boundary between reality and fictionality; boundaries between different literary traditions, modes and cultures; and boundaries between different kinds of experience or perception, especially the "altered states" associated with sickness, magic, the supernatural, or the divine. CONTRIBUTORS: HELEN COOPER, ROSALIND FIELD, MARIANNE AILES, PHILLIPA HARDMAN, ELIZABETH BERLINGS, SIMON MEECHAM-JONES, ELIZABETH WILLIAMS, ARLYN DIAMOND, ROBERT ROUSE, LAURA ASHE, JUDITH WEISS, IVANA DJORDJEVIC, CORINNE SAUNDERS

Read more less